Resources

HR & Hiring Platform Fountain Drives Value With Nylas Calendar API

What does it take for a 50-person Series A startup to land a roster of Fortune 500 clients? One engineer, one email API, and a healthy dose of hustle is a good place to start.

Fountain is an applicant tracking and recruiting platform which helps companies around the world hire hourly workers at scale using self-service interview booking, automation, machine learning, and customizable workflows. In just a few years, they’ve grown to power hiring solutions for companies like Safeway, Grubhub and Deliveroo.

Using Nylas, Fountain revamped their scheduling feature, going from proof of concept to production in a matter of weeks.

Building a Contextual Scheduling Feature

Fountain wanted their scheduling system to work in harmony with their users’ whole schedule.

They set out to build a scheduling feature that operates as a single source of truth, showing users their Fountain appointments in the context of their personal and work calendars.

It took Fountain one internal hackathon, one engineer, and the Nylas Calendar API to build the scheduling features they had in mind, uniting users’ calendars regardless of the calendar platform.

Moving from Idea to Production in no Time

“Making fast changes and being able to iterate quickly is core to our business,” says Dan Taylor, Product Manager at Fountain. “Nylas is the fastest way to get interoperability with all of the different calendar providers. We went from idea to execution in a couple days.”

The prototype Fountain built in one hackathon accomplished exactly what they hoped it would, instantly syncing users’ external calendars into Fountain's platform. They employed ReactJS on the frontend and Ruby on Rails backend.

Now, Fountain users don’t have to bounce from one calendar to the other, double checking if they’re double booked. With the Nylas Calendar API, Fountain saves recruiters hours of time per week.

At a Glance

Built full-featured scheduling tool 3 times faster with Nylas

Only one engineer was required to build the project in a quick hackathon

The robust scheduling tool integrates with 100% of calendar applications

Dan Ferranti

Product Manager at Fountain

Using individual APIs would have taken three times longer. With the Nylas Calendar API, we went from idea to execution in a couple days.

Dan Taylor

Product Manager at Fountain

Speed to Market Delivered With One API

Fountain’s scheduling has to work because they’re on a fast-paced work schedule of their own. The difference between being competitive and beating the competition is measured in sprints and development cycles. Fountain wants to make the most out of each moment.

Nylas brought together a disparate network of calendar platforms, making all of them easily programmable using one API. Instead of spending valuable time building scheduling integrations for each provider, Fountain built one integration for all platforms.

“Using individual APIs would have taken three times longer,” says Taylor, adding that alternative API providers wouldn’t have supported smaller calendar platforms that Fountain customers rely on. With Nylas, Fountain can ship fast without compromising breadth of calendar coverage.

“We could iterate on our internal view of the calendar without worrying how it integrates with outside providers,” says Taylor. “We know very little about how Outlook 365 works, but our customers are using that calendar system and it’s integrated to our product via Nylas. This allows us to offload that knowledge to Nylas and not have to worry about how Microsoft’s product works, or any of the other myriad of calendar providers.”

After bringing the Nylas integration into their users hands, it now takes users less time to view, modify and manage appointments because their service is more streamlined. These are the kinds of features that drive user engagement, happiness, and ultimately revenue.

Success at Scale With Nylas

Fountain is taking the time they saved with Nylas and putting it to work. The Fountain team is focused on aggressive international expansion, as well as leveraging AI to build smart scheduling that recommends appointment times or automatically rejects appointments that conflict with either user’s schedule.

On the Nylas platform, Fountain knows they can expand with confidence and continue to serve everyone from early stage startups to the enterprise.

“Scheduling will be a core part of our product no matter what company is using us,” says Taylor.

Nylas is the engine that makes that scheduling feature easy to implement and scale.

Interested in Learning More About How the Nylas APIs Can Power Your Platform?